Vietnamese spend at least $1 billion and as high as $1.5 billion per year to have their children educated abroad, said a representative of the Ministry of Finance according to wire reports.

Nguyen Truong Giang, deputy head of the Ministry’s department of financial administration and career, said the minimum cost for a student who studies abroad is around $10,000 to $15,000 a year.

Statistics of the Ministry of Education and Training showed that 98,536 Vietnamese studied aboard during the 2010-11 academic year. This figure rose by 7 percent to 106,104 students for 2011-12, said Giang.

If the education quality of Viet Nam is of the same quality of other countries within Asia, the number of Vietnamese students studying there, currently 33 percent of the overseas students, will significantly decrease, he added.

At the moment, Viet Nam only has a few international universities, including the RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) Viet Nam and the BritishUniversity of Viet Nam.

Last September, Viet Nam’s government issued a decree regulating some specific conditions for setting up international universities in the country.

The decree said prospective schools must be prepared to invest at least $7,201 per student, not counting the cost of leasing the necessary land, and total expenditures for such projects must be at least $14.4 million.